Zarles wrote:OMG - GAUNTLET. My friend John used to say 'Thor needs head - badly' ALL the time.

Here I thought that was exclusive to my neck of the woods.

This thread needs a poll.

hahahaha, yeah with the gauntlet!! I still shout to my friend when we are playing Halo deathmatch: "BILL LASTNAME...IS ABOUT TO DIE!!" in the gauntlet voice.

Cool news about the Dragon's Lair and Space Ace! I don't think I ever got into the damned castle in Dragon's Lair, but I've heard that once you get decent at it you can beat it in a matter of minutes?? Is that true?

I say thee nay on the poll...there are two many good ones to choose from.

Whomever mentioned G-Loc on the last page (too lazy to go back)...yeah, I loved that game too!!

COMIC LEGEND: Donkey Kong was originally a Popeye video game with Popeye, Olive Oyl and Bluto in place of Mario, Pauline and Donkey Kong.

STATUS: True

ANYhoo, for years, there have been certain theories bandied about about the origins of the 1981 video game classic from Nintendo, Donkey Kong.

Specifically that legendary video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto originally designed the game (which was a re-purposing of the hardware of a failed Nintendo game called Retro Scope, which IS worth mentioning – thanks, SoggyHydrox!) to be a licensed Popeye game, but after Nintendo lost the license, new characters were created based on the Popeye characters.

The parallels are eerie between the classic triangle of Bluto, Olive Oyl and Popey with the set-up of Donkey Kong, where the over-sized Donkey Kong (Bluto) kidnaps Pauline/Lady (Olive) and forces Jumpman/Mario (Popeye) to come save her.

Now, Nintendo has always conceded that the game DID have origins involving Popeye. Their story was that they pursued the Popeye license and failed to get it. At that point in time, they then asked Miyamoto to come up with brand-new characters that they could market for future games, and Miyamoto was inspired by the classic triangle set-up of the Popeye strip and he then invented the characters and plot of Donkey Kong.

That has always been the story – that Miyamoto was inspired by Popeye, but Donkey Kong was developed separately from their failed attempt at a Popeye license.

A coupe of years ago, though, Miyamoto explained that the Popeye game was much further along than many folks thought it was in the past:

I sketched out a few ideas for games using Popeye. At that point, Yokoi-san [Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo head engineer and the fellow in charge of the project - BC] was good enough to bring these ideas to the President’s attention and in the end one of the ideas received official approval. Yokoi-san thought that designers would become necessary members of development teams in order to make games in the future. And that’s how Donkey Kong came about.

And when asked to confirm, then, that the game was, in fact, a Popeye game, he continued:

That’s right. But while I can’t recall exactly why it was, we were unable to use Popeye in that title. It really felt like the ladder had been pulled out from under us, so to speak. It was a really lucky break! So next we began to flesh out the idea for a game based on the concept we had come up with.

So there you have it, straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth! Imagine how different things would have been if there was no Jumpman and, in turn, no Mario? Would the Popeye game have still been a hit? It was a very well-designed game, after all.

Interestingly enough, Nintendo DID end up releasing a Popeye game in 1982, and it was basically based on the (by then quite popular) Donkey Kong format.

Thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto for the great information! And thanks to Jeff Ryan for suggesting this one a few years back!

It's been that long. DAMN, now I feel old. Gee thanks. Seriously, tho, Dig Dug's always been one of my favorites and before I moved here, I was fortunate to get to play it semi-regularly in an arcade in Bristol, VA. Nothing more satisfying than dropping a rock on several bad guys and racking up some serious points.

What would change this from looking really awesome to mind blowing were if the battle areas were open instead of a scripted route, and if you could link 2-6 battlepods for cooperative play (with Mics in between the pods of course...my entire life I've wanted to utter the phrase "lock s-foils in attack position" and have it actually achieve some result).

Good analogy! My initial reaction was "badass", but as the video went on, I kinda got bored (at least bored watching it, playing it might be different). I love the idea of playing as a tie fighter though...can't remember if that was part of the original game or not.

Bottom line: I'd play this in a heartbeat, spend about an hour on it if I could, then probably never do it again. Doesn't seem to have the draw for me to play constantly...

CHRIS KOHLER wrote:Pac-Man, the biggest arcade game of all time, turns 35 today. Here’s a look back at the era when Pac-Man fever ruled the world.

Released by the Japanese company Namco on May 22, 1980, Pac-Man was like nothing else at the time. At a time when Space Invaders and Asteroids and other games with abstracted, monochrome graphics ruled the arcade, Pac-Man offered a colorful cartoonish design with an appealing central character. It revolved around eating, not shooting; and it was designed to appeal to young women and couples, not dudes in sketchy bowling-alley bars (although they all played it too).

The colorful design and unique collect-the-dots maze gameplay—plus the wonderful tension of running away from those darned ghosts, then scrambling to eat them once you got a power pellet—made Pac-Man almost instantly addictive, eating quarters as rapaciously as its protagonist swallowed pixels. By one count, Namco sold 400,000 Pac-Man machines, head and shoulders above anything that had come before, or since. And it’s still highly playable and popular in a way its contemporaries are not—few people are paying for Asteroids or Space Invaders updates today, but Namco Bandai still makes and sells variations on Pac-Man on every platform imaginable.

But Pac-Man was more than a hit game. It was a genuine cultural inflection point. Everywhere you looked, there was Pac-Man: On boxes of breakfast cereal, on television, even on the radio. It marked the first time a particular videogame and its iconography became as culturally relevant as a hit TV show or movie. The era of abstract Pong paddles and blocky spaceships was over—it was lovable characters like Pac that were going to be the face of games from now on. Pac-Man was gaming’s first true franchise, in a way that most successful games today spawn spin-offs and sequels.

Pac-Man’s ubiquity was our first indication that games were about to become the dominant entertainment medium of the information age. (It also arguably marked the beginning of Japan’s impending pop-cultural invasion of the rest of the world, even if players at the time didn’t know where it came from.)